NOTICE: Rules are subject to change without notice, however TheShow leadership does have a policy to put to vote any rule changes that could be deemed as controversial, or ones that may need discussed. This league is closer to a democracy than a dictatorship, and the Commissioner doesn't like to be the sole decision maker in the league. This is our league and decisions made regarding how the league is run are usally made collectively by the league. If any rules are in question, please feel free to discuss them in the General League Chatter forum.

Annual Salaries: Another area that TheShow's front office has decided to increase regulation above what the game allows, is when it comes to the amounts offered from year to year. Some General Managers have figured out ways to load a contract with drastically different annual salary values, where the total contract could have huge annual values at the front end of the contract, or towards the back end of the contract. This allows teams to get the total value of the salary high enough that the player finds the deal more desirable, but because the player engine doesn't see the drastic annual values, General Managers are somewhat "gaming" the game engine to get them to accept contracts that real players would likely not accept. Because of this, TheShow has implemented the following guideline regarding annual salary amounts:

The lowest annual salary amount offered must be within 50% of the largest annual salary amount offered, including option years.

Therefore an offer of 3 years, the first being $3M, the second being $6M and the third being $9M would be invalid, since $3M is less than half of $9M. If this General Manager wanted to offer a highest annual salary of $9M, the lowest amount offered would have to be at least $4.5M.

Another example would be an offer of 5 years, where the first season is $12M and the remaining 4 seasons are $6M. This offer would be allowed, since no annual salary is less than half of the highest value.

Buyouts: Team Option buyout values must be at least 25% of the value of that option year's salary value. Player Options and Vested Options do not need to have any buyout values.

Option Years:

The value of the option years must be within 25% of the contract's highest annual salary value.

The total number of option years must be less than or equal to the total number of guaranteed years in the contract.

Player Options cannot come after Team Options or Vested Options, if multiple options years are used. This is to prevent a GM from backloading a desirable high salary player option at the end of a contract that the GM has no intention of honoring, but uses just to entice the player to sign the contract or extension.

Vested Option Criteria: The criteria to determine a vested option year, must follow the same guidelines as Contract Incentives as shown under Rules 2.B.1-4 below, listed as "Other Restrictions."